A note on Guillaume Amontons and the laws of friction

Abstract

Amontons’ widely cited paper of December 1699 on the subject of friction in machines is not the first to contain his statement of the laws of friction. An earlier paper on a novel heat engine, presented to the Académie Royale des Sciences 6 months earlier, describes the measurements of forces in glass polishing and contains a clear statement that the friction force is independent of contact area and proportional to normal load. The comments in Amontons’ paper on the physical origins of the friction force at surface irregularities (asperities) do not appear in the contemporary record of his lecture in December 1699, but were included in the published version after similar ideas had been presented by Philippe de la Hire; credit for these ideas should be given to La Hire rather than to Amontons.